Scholars of the 20th-century writer Franz Kafka were in a state of suspense last night at the news that the remains of his estate, which have been hoarded in a Tel Aviv flat for decades, may soon be revealed.

Previously unseen documents, postcards, sketches and personal belongings of the Czech-Jewish writer, who wrote in German, have been gathering dust in the home of Esther Hoffe, the former secretary of Kafka's friend and executor Max Brod since his death in 1968. Hoffe's refusal to relinquish the documents led to a literary game of cat and mouse between her and the state of Israel, under pressure from the country's cultural elite, which on one occasion even led to her arrest on suspicion of smuggling Kafka's writings out of the country.

Now, following her death at the age of 101, Kafka lovers hope the row may have come to an end. Researchers are ready to pounce on the contents of Hoffe's flat, fully expecting the items will throw new light on the mysterious writer who died at the age of 41, as well as his friendship with Brod, his greatest champion.

But authorities in Tel Aviv have warned that the papers, with their high sulphuric acid content, may have stood up poorly to conditions in Hoffe's damp flat in the centre of Tel Aviv and to the hordes of cats and dogs which she kept until two years ago when health inspectors intervened after neighbours complained about the stench.

The items have a complex provenance reaching back to 1924, when Kafka died of tuberculosis in Vienna. Brod took over Kafka's estate, including several unpublished manuscripts, and famously defied his friend's instructions to burn them. In 1939, the night before the Nazis entered Prague, Brod fled the city with two suitcases containing what he could of the estate. He escaped via Romania to Palestine, later moving the archive to the safety of Switzerland during the Suez crisis in 1956.

In 1961 he gave most of the manuscripts to the Bodleian library at Oxford University at the request of Kafka's heirs, but kept hold of The Trial because he said it had been a gift to him from Kafka. Nearly 30 years later, Hoffe sold the manuscript of Kafka's novel for a record £1m at Sotheby's.

Few doubt that there are other treasures waiting to be found, due to tantalising utterances Hoffe made over the years about Brod's estate.

On one occasion, at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion airport, Hoffe was arrested on suspicion of illegally smuggling valuable archive material out of the country. Police found letters by Kafka as well as his travel journal in her luggage. Following that incident she allowed employees from Israel's state archive to catalogue the items she had, but was accused of holding back key documents.

Repeated attempts by academics to persuade her to give the items in her possession to the national library in Jerusalem failed.

The German publisher Artemis and Winkler paid Hoffe a five-figure advance for Brod's diaries in the 1980s, but has still to receive them. Hoffe let it be known in 1993 that she had transferred them to a bank vault in Tel Aviv to which she is still believed to have had access when she died. The legal battle between the publisher and her heirs is still in progress.

"Esther was always afraid that someone would steal these materials from her," Avital Ben Horin, a close friend of Brod's, told Ha'aretz, the Tel Aviv daily. Describing Hoffe's flat as an "unsuitable" location for the estate because of Tel Aviv's humidity, she added: "But it was impossible to convince her".

Puzzle

Commentators have remarked that the story could have stemmed from Kafka's own pen. Kafka, the man still considered a literary puzzle 84 years after his death, "is causing the world to hold its breath," Germany's Die Welt newspaper wrote. Ha'aretz, which broke the story, called it "Kafkaesque", turning to the very phrase inspired by Kafka's own writings to describe something which is elusive and menacingly complex.

Much to the frustration of academics, archivists and the Israeli government, Hoffe, who became Brod's lover following the death of his wife, was said to have jealously clung to the papers which Brod left to her in his will because of her wish to protect intimate details of Brod's life. It will now be up to her septuagenarian daughters, Ruth and Hava, to decide on the estate's fate. But according to reports, Israeli authorities have indicated their willingness to intervene to save what is considered an invaluable piece of Jewish cultural heritage.

"This is really very exciting, particularly if there are documents left that have not yet been published," said Professor Freddie Rokem, a lecturer in theatre arts at Tel Aviv University, who organised a conference to honour Brod on his 100th anniversary in 1984. "Hoffe more or less inherited the suitcase of Kafka papers from Brod. The question is whether she knew how much it was worth from the beginning, or did she really only learn its true value later on?"

Josef Cermak, author of several books on Kafka, said he hoped the release of the items might help clear up quarrels in the literary world in this, the 125th anniversary of his birth, which is being marked with events around the globe.

"There are so many mistruths which have been written about Kafka. For academic purposes it is crucial that we get to see what the unpredictable Miss Hoffe has kept from us for so long."

Profile

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a middle-class Jewish family. His most famous novel, The Trial, published in 1925, became a symbol of 20th-century totalitarianism and gave birth to the word "Kafkaesque", used to describe everything from entrapment in bureaucracy to the absurdity of life. His other works included The Metamorphosis (1915) and The Castle (1926). The themes of alienation, persecution, and hopelessness run through his writing, which attracted little attention until after his death in 1924 from tuberculosis in a sanitorium near Vienna, aged 41.